About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

19 January 2014

Religious Drama

by Kirk Woodward[Once
again my friend Kirk Woodward has submitted a fascinating piece of theater
writing, a discussion of the work of French dramatist Paul Claudel and
specifically his 1910 play, The Tidings Brought to Mary (L’Annonce faite à Marie).It’s
Kirk’s entry into a broader discussion of religious art, particularly religious
drama.Needless to add, it’s a worthy
addition to ROT, and I thank Kirk for
allowing me to share his thoughts with readers of ROT.~Rick]

I
never thought I’d get to see a production of a play by Paul Claudel in the
United States. Yet I’ve not only seen a production of his play The Tidings Brought to Mary, but even
worked a little on it. (I was one of two rehearsal pianists.) As a result I
have a different view of the possible relations between theater and religion
than I did before.

So,
first of all, who is Paul Claudel, and why should he matter?

Claudel
lived from 1868 to 1955. I have been familiar with his name for two reasons. One
is that he is taught in theater history classes as a major French playwright of
the Twentieth Century and, more particularly, as a “religious playwright.” Eric
Bentley, writing in In Search of Theatre (1952)
about a production of another Claudel play, Partage
de Midi (The Break of Noon, 1906),
calls Claudel “one of the two or three outstanding French playwrights of the
past half century.”

The
other reason I have been familiar with Claudel’s name is because of a famous
passage in W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939):

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardons Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons [Yeats] for writing well.

Auden
later became uncomfortable with this passage and deleted it from his collected
poems. Which of Claudel’s views did Auden have in mind? There are, to my
knowledge, two possibilities. One is that in French politics Claudel was a
conservative. Not only a French patriot, he became a diplomat and represented
France with distinction, including a five year stint as ambassador to the
United States (1928–1933, in which capacity his picture was on the
cover of Time magazine in March 1927).

Because
of a poem Claudel wrote praising Marshal Philippe Pétain (“Paroles au Maréchal” [“Words to the Marshal”], May 1941), the Prime Minister
of the Vichy government of France that collaborated with the Nazis, it is
sometimes assumed that Claudel was not only conservative, but that he had
Fascist sympathies. This appears not to be the case; Pétain was greatly admired
as a hero of France when Claudel wrote his poem, a distinction later muddied
when Petain headed a French puppet government that collaborated with Germany.
Claudel wrote scornfully about both the Nazis and about anti-Semitism, beginning
at an early date, and he seems to have been closely and suspiciously watched by
the Germans during World War II.

Another
possibility is that Auden, who did not rejoin the church he had first left until
1940, was thinking about Claudel’s fervent Roman Catholicism. Claudel had a
“conversion experience” at the age of 18, and remained an active Roman Catholic
the rest of his life. His plays are infused with his religious beliefs. But
how, exactly?

The relation between religion and
art is a real brain teaser. Because I’m a playwright – feel free to see my plays
listed at spiceplays.com ­­­– my
examples come from the theater. Any art offers equivalents. Consider the
following possibilities
(which in reality are not mutually exclusive).

Since we’ve referred to Paul
Claudel’s “conversion experience,” imagine a play written for the explicit
purpose of converting people to a particular religious belief. We would, I
imagine, agree that this is “religious art.”

Imagine a play with the same purpose
– to convert people to a particular religion – but written by an avowed
atheist, who hates religion in all forms, but who has been paid to write the
play. It’s a product of pure cynicism on the part of the writer. Does it matter
to the work that the artist is completely unreligious? Should the knowledge of
the author’s relation to the material make any difference in our evaluation of
the play in religious terms?

Suppose the play actually achieves
its purpose and “converts” a number of people. Do we then consider it a
“religious” play? For religious people, can any information about the author
outweigh the play’s work of salvation?

What if our “religious” play is
excellently written, and yet “converts” no one? If it fails in its purpose, can
it be called a success? Or the opposite: what if the play has a great effect on
people, and yet is by any reasonable aesthetic standard a piece of garbage? How
do we value that piece? Can it be both bad art and good religion – or, for that
matter, the reverse?

These questions have real-life instances.
For example, Eugene O’Neill wrote both Days
Without End (1933) and The Iceman
Cometh (1939). Days Without End
is generally considered to represent at least a momentary reconciliation
between O’Neill and the Roman Catholic church. The Iceman Cometh, on the other hand, presents not only a world
without God, but a world whose inhabitants survive only through their illusions.

From the aesthetic point of view, few
would claim that Days Without End is
a superior play to The Iceman Cometh. What
should the Roman Catholic verdict be? Ought it to prefer the play that supports
the church, even if it’s almost universally considered a much lesser work?

And what about plays that have no
“religious” content at all? Should Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965) be considered a bad play by religious people because
it has no religious significance (assuming it doesn’t)?

Here are some possible ways of
looking at the issue of the relation of religion and art, starting with the
most straightforward:

If
it says it’s about religion, it’s about religion. If it says it’s religious
art, it’s religious art.

This point of view has the virtue of
ending pretty much any argument. Whatever anyone says, goes. If I write a play
about Jesus, it belongs in the religious column. If I write a play about Oscar
Madison, it doesn’t. If Oscar breaks down at the end of the play and prays to
God to save Felix’s soul, it moves over to the religious column. If a bitter
atheist writes a play about how wonderful God is, religious folk say God bless
‘im. One more for us.

This point of view isn’t interested
in whether the art is good or bad – whatever that may mean – only that the work
of art is on Our Side. One thinks of agitprop dramas of the Thirties, about
which the question frequently asked wasn’t “Is it a good play?” but “Is it on
our side?”

The problem with this perspective is
that, without any counterweight of an artistic standard, what’s created from this
point of view tends to be pretty deadly. After all, anybody can write it; all
they have to be is sincere. The catalogues of all the major dramatic publishing
companies contain page after page of “religious” plays.

Most of them – I’m pretty sure – you
wouldn’t want to see. (I’d be interested to read the exceptions.) They shine,
so to speak, with borrowed glory: because they’re about God, they claim special
merit. But they are seldom produced except for audiences of partisans.

By the way, what about Muslim drama?
There is such. Presumably that’s religious drama, too, but do non-Muslim
religious folk endorse it, or do they limit “religious” art to their own
religion?

Related
to the preceding approach is that the role of art is to serve God, and therefore
art is to be judged by how well it does God’s work. Tolstoy adopted this idea
in later years; he found himself unable to see how purely aesthetic interests
mattered, when God’s work is so important.

By this standard, categories of
“good” and “bad” art are acknowledged but irrelevant; what matters is how well
the work does God’s work. There are traveling theatrical troupes that perform
religious dramas in churches for church audiences. According to the approach
just presented, it doesn’t matter if they are excellent artists, or if they’re
duffers – they’re evangelical, and that’s what matters.

A problem with this approach is that
it tends to be adopted by censors, fanatics, and dictators, who have their own
ideas of what the good is and who also have the means to impose their standards
on others. Religious organizations seldom act well when they acquire power –
quite the contrary. I wonder if there are many Roman Catholics in the United
States today, for example, who would want to see the return of a powerful Catholic
Legion of Decency (known as CLOD – honestly), telling them which movies they
should and shouldn’t watch.

Another problem with this approach is
that, with religious art and practically any other kind of art, a work that’s
created with a teaching purpose tends to be dreary. How can it help being
second-rate? There’s no joy of discovery in creating something that’s already
figured out what it wants to say. Think, not of religious, but of political art
– for example, the paintings of Stalin’s era, with strong muscular workers
looking toward the Socialist future – surely one of the best examples of dead
art.

The
opposite approach, which we might call the aesthetic approach, says that there
is no such thing as religious art at all. There’s only art, whether good or
bad. Art takes as its subject whatever it wants, whether it’s religion or
politics or love or whatever.

This approach also ends all
arguments, because it makes ideas of religion irrelevant. Whatever one’s
aesthetic standards are, they’re the ones that apply in the realm of “art for
art’s sake”. Obviously many critics favor this approach, because it means they
don’t have to take religion seriously. Even overtly religious poetry like the
later poems of T. S. Eliot and Auden can be evaluated in a purely “artistic”
way.

This approach eliminates the
difficulty of making sense of a work of art in religious terms, but also
eliminates a great deal of human experience in an arbitrary way. It also has
the potential to falsify the nature of the work being considered: one can read,
say, the book of the prophet Isaiah as poetry, but it wasn’t written as a poem;
it was written as a challenge to lead different lives.

We
can take an anthropological approach and say that works of art reflect the
ideas of religion held by people at the time. This approach looks backward into
history, noting, for example, that the ancient Greek tragedies were performed
as elements of religious festivals. The approach also looks beyond Western art,
to non-Western cultures, looking at the way different cultures present
themselves, often without making value judgments on their beliefs or art forms.

A limitation of this approach,
again, is that it tends to trivialize religion, and whatever else it may be,
religion is not a trivial matter. If we see that everyone believes something, it’s easy to decide that no
belief is really important. That may be so; then again, it may not.

A
new version of the anthropological approach is to assert that modernism has
destroyed the coherence of works of art so that it’s meaningless to say that a
work is “religious,” or for that matter to label it in any other way. A
post-modernist, reveling in deconstructionism, would go even further and say
that no matter what its intention, a work of art can only reflect the
oppressive power structure of its time.

This approach negates the experience
of art, particularly the distinction between greater and lesser works. Deconstructionism
asserts that art is fatally limited, and certainly that is true of poor art,
whether new or old, but great art gives us a vision of coherence and of
liberation. There are academics who would deny that it does; all I can say is
that I feel sorry for them, and I wonder why they bother to teach, since they
dislike their subject matter so much.

We
can go in the other direction, and say that on the contrary, all art is
religious. I have promoted this approach myself elsewhere, in my not-yet-published
book Two Worlds, One Lord:

An effect of art is to make us
experience the temporal in relation to the spiritual. Li Po ([Eighth-Century
Chinese poet] translated by Ezra Pound) puts it this way:

That art is best which to the soul’s
range give no bound;

Something besides the form, something
beyond the sound.

Even the most negative, pessimistic
works of art make us feel the absence of the spiritual world in our temporal
lives, whether the artists consciously intend that effect or not.

The distinction between “secular” and “spiritual” art is not
particularly important. Any work of art – for that matter, any activity of our
lives – illuminates life in the temporal world, or in the Spiritual world, or,
most frequently, in the areas where the two worlds interact.

This viewpoint would be irritating
to an atheistic writer, because it says, “No matter what you are trying to do,
you are still reflecting spiritual issues – you can’t help it.” A limitation of
this viewpoint is that if everything is religion, then nothing is – what’s the
point of talking about religion at all, if what we mean is “life”?

Related
to the preceding approach is the concept that the purpose of art is to
celebrate God’s creation – in Auden’s phrase, to “praise all that is for
being.” On this line, as above, even a skeptical or atheistic viewpoint still
reflects the creation of which it is a part.

The objection to the previous
viewpoint would apply to this one as well.

I have presented these various
approaches to give some idea of the range of issues involved in the relation of
religion and art. How does Paul Claudel approach the question?

He wrote The Tidings
Brought to Mary (originally,
in French, L’Annonce faite à Marie)
in 1910, and revised it, particularly the prologue and the last act, over
another couple of decades. The poetic nature of the dialogue and the
difficulties of translation are probably reasons that it has seldom been performed
in the United States.

It was
first presented on Broadway in 1922; its next New York production, as far as I
can tell, was by the Blackfriars Repertory Theater (sponsored by the Dominican
order) in 2009, revived in 2011. (The Blackfriars followed Tidings with a production of Claudel’s The Satin Slipper.) But I have not been able to find records of other
productions in this country.

Union
Congregational Church, in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, makes some adventurous
choices in the theatrical productions it presents (for example, a version of
James Joyce’s The Dead). Director
Elaine Molinaro brought the idea for Tidings
to the church, which produced it in association with her production company
Culture Connection Theater. Molinaro wrote in the program notes for the
production, which ran from November 8 through 16, 2013:

I have dreamt about
[Claudel’s] play for over 20 years of my life ever since I first saw it
performed in Paris when I was a study-abroad student there. It has always been
my dream to direct this work of art.

The
repetition of the word “dream” in her remarks is appropriate. The play (in an
imagistic if unwieldy translation by Walter Fowlie) creates a dreamlike
atmosphere. Set in the Thirteenth Century, its events take place at the time of
the battles of Joan of Arc and the crowning of Charles VII at Reims.

Molinaro
staged the play in the church sanctuary, in front of a series of backdrops (by
Rich Silivanch, executed by Ashley Petix) inspired by the French Santon
nativity scene figurines of the early 1800s; costumed the play (with designs by
Jonathan Green) in styles from that same period (in contradiction to its
Medieval setting); and included music by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Duruflé,
Igor Stravinsky, Gabriel Fauré, and others, sung by a choir of eight.

That
same choir added to the dreamlike effect of the play by representing, at
various points in the play, servants, trees, and angels, as part of a staging
that combined the formal – even the emblematic – and the naturalistic in
surprising ways.

Similarly
the acting varied from the realistic to the highly rhetorical – in a witty
stroke, Molinaro had more than one character “happen” to end up behind the
church’s pulpit just in time to deliver a particularly long and complex speech.
The result brought Brecht to mind, but also in spirit seemed genuinely
Medieval.

The
play takes place in the Tardenois region of agricultural France, where Violaine
Vercors, the older daughter of the family, is spotted by her envious sister
Mara kissing Pierre, a leper, as she tells him goodbye. Mara uses this
information to ruin her sister’s engagement to Jacques, the foreman of the
farm, while at the same time Violaine develops leprosy herself, and leaves home
for a life of isolation and shame.

Mara
marries Jacques and they have a child, who dies, and Mara brings the infant’s
body to Violaine insisting that she bring the baby back to life. Violaine pleads
that only God can perform such miracles; in fact the baby does live again.
Violaine dies, forgiving everyone and giving them a greater idea of God’s love
and power. In the course of the play, Pierre is also reported to have been
cured of his leprosy – by Violane’s kiss.

How
does The Tidings Brought to Mary
relate to the attitudes toward “religious” theater described above? It
certainly makes a clear claim to be a piece of “religious theater,” and I doubt
that an audience member would miss its overt intention to participate in the
work of proselytizing. It is full of comments on God’s power and on what God
can do.

But I
would assert that it’s not only a “religious” play, but a good play in its own right. Why?Well, its
characters are interesting and well-drawn, the story is dramatic, the world of
the play imaginative, the language evocative. But the same could be said about other
plays, many of them definitely not “religious” in intent. To see what makes The Tidings Brought to Mary a piece of
religious art and a good play, we can
start by looking at its title.

We
might think, from the title of the play, that it tells the story of the birth
of Jesus as narrated in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. As we have seen, it
does not (although the climax of the play, at the end of the third of the four
acts, does occur on Christmas Eve). Why did Claudel choose that title for the
play?

The
answer goes to his dramaturgical approach to his story. Rather than directly
base his plot on stories from the Bible, he creates a new story that uses Bible
stories as its building blocks. Principally, the play dramatizes a powerful
situation: what must Joseph have thought and felt when Mary told him that she
was pregnant – and that he was very definitely not the father?

But
rather than use the characters of Joseph and Mary for his play, Claudel
presents a parallel story – how Jacques feels when Violaine tells Jacques that
she has contracted leprosy he knows must have come from Pierre. The conflict,
the dramatic value, the depth of feeling that must have existed, are parallel.
The situation is strong and vivid. The Biblical narrative is implicit within
it.

Claudel
uses the same strategy throughout the play. Among the elements found in the
Bible that are echoed in The Tidings
Brought to Mary are:

The
Sermon on the Mount

The parable
of the landowner leaving his home, to return at an unexpected time

The
Last Supper

The
miracle of bringing a child back to life

The
parable of the Good Samaritan

The
parable of the Prodigal Son

Peter’s
betrayal of Jesus

Paul’s
farewell at Ephesus

The
famous passage in Ecclesiastes – “To everything there is a season . . . .”

None of
these are referred to directly. Instead, they are embodied in the plot of the
play. An audience member unfamiliar with the Bible passages involved can
experience the import of the material based entirely on the way it is presented
in the play. No special knowledge of the Bible is required. An audience member
will experience the impact of the various episodes from the scriptures while
watching an involving play.

I am
grateful to Elaine Molinaro and the Union Congregational Church for providing
an opportunity to see a play that sheds a light on the important issue of the
relation between drama and religion, whether or not that was an aim of the
production.

Claudel’s
approach to “religious theater,” as represented by The Tidings Brought to Mary, is by no means the only approach
possible. But the play carries its approach out so successfully that it sets a
high standard for other writers who wrestle with the same issue, and it
presents one solution, not in the form of an essay or a theory, but in the form
of a living play.

[Kirk, among his other talents, is a playwright
and as he’s invited readers to visit his website, I want to provide the link to
it: http://spiceplays.com/.There
you will find his plays available for production, including his musicals and
his plays for audiences of children.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kirk also has a selection of “religious” plays
for consideration.Please take the time
to check out Spiceplays:
I guarantee you’ll find his work surprising and engaging.]